<p>Hello, would anyone know just how difficult a Statistics major and an Applied Mathematics major are relative to the difficulty of a pure Mathematics major or an Engineering major? Particularly at Berkeley.</p>
<p>Thanks.</p>
<p>Don't know about math at Berkeley...but engineering doesn't have a reputation of being easy there.</p>
<p>At that point it really entirely depends on what your own strengths and weaknesses are. Engineering might appear easy but feel tedious, you might really be just better at conceptualizing abstract notions than working with concrete things, etc. </p>
<p>So it's hard to say, but usually, the first year curriculum for pure and applied math is pretty much the same (I'm not too sure about stats majors but it should be as well), so if you're thinking of heading for math rather than engineering you will have the time to discover which branch interests you more.</p>
<p>applied math and pure math at cal are very similar. you have to take almost all the same classes--have a look at <a href="http://math.berkeley.edu/undergraduate_major_requirements.html%5B/url%5D">http://math.berkeley.edu/undergraduate_major_requirements.html</a> and you'll see that both applied math and pure math have the same core requirements, differing only in electives.</p>
<p>as for engineering vs. math, I'm going to echo blobof in saying that it really depends on your strengths and weaknesses because math and engineering are really different once you get into the more advanced stuff. In upper div engineering you learn about how to make something or apply a concept you learned in math or science class, often using lots of approximations and non-rigorous derivations. In contrast, in upper div math you're really concerned about rigor and proofs--it's much more abstract. Granted, there are some math-y engineering classes (ME 185 comes to mind), but by and large advanced engineering classes are very different in nature from advanced math classes. </p>
<p>i don't know much about statistics.</p>